Video Games Made Me Do It

By now, we've all heard about the latest crime that has some connection to videogames. We, as a community of gamers, all have our own opinions on violent games. There are questions every gamer should ask themselves: does realistic violence make a game better? Should there be any limit to the violence in games? Does the violence in games affect anyone in real life? These questions are not easy. One must take into account various games and even companies that seem to pride themselves on being violent. More than that, what about those of us who play games and sometimes think to ourselves, "this game would be a lot cooler if i could kill these people"?

I'm not about to start a holy war against violent videogames (after all, my favorite one ends with the hero stabbing someone in the face). Nor am I going to assault the companies that create these games or the gamers who love them. People with a sane and sensible mind know that each person's actions are their own. Some things are just that obvious. Can any game legitimately be called a "murder simulator" for real life? Of course not. No more than Monopoly being able to be called a "business simulator". Will that stop people from claiming such absurdities? Of course not. What's important is that we all see games for what they are at their core: entertainment.

That may sound like I'm lowering the very essence of gaming down to the depths of reality television, but I assure you it's quite the opposite. Like many other gamers, I feel there is no reason not to put games into the same category as "art". But there is no game whose purpose is "to be art". Games are meant to affect us in some way and usually meant to be enjoyed. Same thing can be said with cinema and, frankly, most of what's considered art. This is a slight digression, but I want to be clear: Video games can no more inspire these horrific acts of violence than cinema, literature, or even paintings. Was anyone murdered after watching Leon The Professional? Did anyone go insane after reading Poe? Does anyone dream of what haunts the person in Edvard Munch's "Scream"? Should having a bad diet also be reason enough to commit murder?

The gaming community is not a group to be generalized on account of the few people who commit violent crimes and also play videogames. I often use the word community when referring to gamers as a group because... well, that's just the best word to describe us. Anyone who's ever been to a LAN party -- hell, anyone who's ever even played multiplayer (on the couch or online) can see why the word "community" is especially fitting. We gamers play well together. It's to the point now where even the lack of co-op or online play makes the game's overall score worse. Gaming is getting more and more mainstream, and the community expects developers to know we have friends, and we want to play some videogames with them. Personally, I even thoroughly enjoy watching other people play. I know when I invite some pretty ladies over for a game of Mariokart, I want them to have fun. I, like the designers of these games, want the people who play them to enjoy the experience.

There is no question as to whether or not videogames can influence people. This blog and countless others are testaments to that. If games had zero influence, there wouldn't be anyone trying to get into the videogame industry. No designers, no programmers, no critics. I'd be out of luck. Will people be more likely to break the law if exposed to violent games? I would whole-heartedly say No. Almost every game has a protagonist fighting against the antagonist (Tetris just squeaks by on that), and most games in general have someone or something dying (getting killed) or have the protagonist finding items lying around, often in someone's house, which means that they're stealing from helpless NPC innocents. If games made the morals of gamers fall away, then, with the gaming community as large as it is, I'm shocked more and more people aren't becoming vigilantes. ...Oh. Shit. Nevermind.

Flower

There are few things in this world that are worse than going to bed frustrated over a video game, such as cancerAIDS. I’m sure many of you know what I am talking about. That one impossibly difficult boss who smites you one second after you spawn. That door that requires a key you searched everywhere for but still cannot find it for the life of you. Or maybe just getting humiliatingly reamed without mercy in a versus match of Left 4 Dead, Brawl, Counterstrike, Mario Kart, or what have you.

YOU'RE TEARING ME APART, BLUE SHELL!

You begin to obsess over these obstacles and how much of your precious time you have dedicated to everything that it just seems to be a complete waste. You’re a failure. You suck at life. You suck at taking care of your dog that just starved to death because you forgot to feed it. Well, hopefully not that last one. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you’re just too damn proud to admit it. Jerk.

These trials and tribulations are also what make a majority of video games so enjoyable. It can provide that feeling of relief like after finishing a ridiculously hard final exam; once it’s done you never have to deal with it ever again.

Knowing this, imagine a game developer talking to a big gaming executive as he tries to pitch a game that has little to no migraine inducing hardships, and which is not specifically geared towards kids. And it’s centered around botany:

Exec: “Lemme get this straight. You’re a flower petal…”

Guy: “Yes.”

Exec: “Okay. And your goal is to float around collecting other flower petals…”

Guy: “Right.”

Exec: “Is there a time limit or anything?”

Guy: “No, you go at your own pace.”

Exec: “Any characters? Story arcs? Boss fights?”

Guy: “Not really, kinda, and no. You just kind of float around collecting petals.”

Exec: “Float around collecting petals…”

Guy: “Yes.”

*Stony silence. Exec stares straight through guy.*

Guy: “You’re a flower petal.”

Exec: “No, I get it. Would you like some coffee?”

*Executive stands up and grabs coffee pot.*

Guy: “I’m actually not much of a coffee—“

*Exec unloads pot of boiling hot coffee on guy’s head. Guy’s face starts melting off.”

Guy: “OH MY GOD WHYYYYYYYY?????”

*Exec takes out cigar from his jacket’s inside pocket and starts smoking.*

Exec: “You people make me sick.”

That might be a somewhat exaggerated account of what happened, but the premise of the game discussed actually exists. It’s on PS3 from the indie game developers at thatgamecompany and it is named Flower and it deals with flowers! None of the traditional structure from typical challenge based games is to be found here. Exposition through dialogue or text is also nowhere to be seen. Instead, the game relies completely on telling its simple nature appreciation story through its serene images and soothing music. The result is one of the most relaxing, stress relieving, and simplest games ever made.

The game starts in the room of a decrepit city apartment where a wilted flower sits on a windowsill.

Once the flower is selected, it takes you to a valley that is riddled with various dead spots of grass. The goal is for the player to control the wind (all by tilting the controller) to blow the single flower petal through the environment to collect as many petals as possible. When the special flowers are collected, the dead patches in the valley come to life. This is the goal in every level, the main feature that changes being the environments explored. The levels lead the player eventually into a bleak, colorless industrial city overgrown with broken power lines and jagged metal clusters. After the six levels are complete, your apartment is now in filled with glorious color with a view of industry and nature living in perfect harmony. Yay!

The real world is a stressful place, so I found myself playing Flower for a good period of time, just letting it wash over me as I would decompress from another fruitless day of applying for jobs, even when my parents would glare at the television confused and worried about what I was doing (their expression pretty much asked “When are you going to kill something?”). The graphics look amazing, especially on a high definition television when every color on the spectrum is splashed on the screen. The soundtrack, which is synchronized with the pace the player plays the level, is also impressive and just full of that positive energy. In many ways this game is just like throwing in a tape of nature sounds, or better yet, being thrown into a roomful of puppies (or kittens, your choice)! I even felt compelled to complete all the PS3 trophy challenges, shamelessly giving myself another excuse to play the game.

If you are looking for a game that will not cause you any grief (because we are all such fragile beings *sniff*) and would like a wholly original gameplay experience then I could not recommend Flower more. If you want to blow $#%* up, decapitate zombies, or beat someone into a pulp, this game might offend you.

4/5 A Beautiful, Relaxing Game. Pretty Dope!

Video Games: Art?

Hey all, howza goin? This is my first post on this Dope site. I’ll celebrate by trying to justify the time I pour into my article here by defending video games as not just one of the world’s favorite past times, nay, but as an important and ever burgeoning Art form. So if you will, allow me to bore you for just one second. Or maybe 300. There has been a lot of furor on the interwebs recently about whether video games should be considered as capital A Art or just a higher tech version of Mouse Trap (see Roger Ebert’s blog that recounts most of this back and forth). I just find this to be a little unfair. Of course it depends on what your definition of Art is, but let’s take one of the more common ones: a medium of expression meant to convey a mood, tell a story, or consider an idea. Since video games are such a visual medium, the Art form it has most in common with would be film, and just like film, it has the ability to tell various stories and communicate ideas.

Not only do video games and movies share a lot in the way that they tell stories (cinematic cut scenes, anyone?) but in their evolution as well. Hell, movies received the same treatment during their infantile years, being more or less dismissed as a silly past time for the uncultured outcasts and youth of society.

1910's nerds had less potato chip stains.

The earliest games and movies were rather simple in their premise. For example, movies—more accurately called “moving pictures” during that time—filmed people leaving factories, hopping on trains, throwing snowballs, and performing various other boring, and not to mention BORING everyday tasks. Video games started with simple goals like eat the dots, avoid the yellow dots, and shoot the dots that are shooting dots at you or else explode into a million dots. They essentially served as little digital board games to pass the time. Neither medium was initially concerned with telling any kind of story, but was more like, “HOLY $#&%! LOOK WHAT WE CAN DO WIT DIS STUFF!!!11!!”

Is Your Mind Blown Yet?

The next major phase in film development was—similar to gaming—using the medium as a means to tell a story. Not to say that many of those stories were that good to begin with, but they had to start somewhere. I believe we are all familiar with the damsel in distress:

Versus

Fast-forward to today. After about more than a century of evolving, the movie industry has been and remains one of the most lucrative entertainment businesses in the world, attracting major talent across the board from writers, actors, graphics artists, and so on. Will video games surpass Hollywood’s popularity? Well, according to various studies it already has. The video game industry has even attracted some big names in Hollywood to contribute (a certain Mr. Spielberg comes to mind). You practically know it’s over when your grandma can beat you at Wii bowling.

HAHA! Old People.

Since the mid 70s, video games have certainly come a long way as an art form. No longer are we only stomping on mushrooms to save a princess who is kidnapped every damn year, avoiding ghosts in order as to eat a bunch of dots in a maze, or trying to collect emeralds in order to stop an evil doctor with a giant mustache (not that there is anything wrong with that) but now we can play (or more accurately experience) games that have all the complex characters, moral ambiguity, detailed environments, and epic scope of a great story.

Sure, there is still a lot of sloppy, but at least well-intentioned, writing in video games (to be fair, have you seen a lot of the crap Hollywood is putting out these days?) and some remain as simple time trials, sports, or fighting games, but that does not lessen all the potential that this medium has. With the sort of advent of independent games, we are able to play games that are not solely meant to achieve a certain goal, but rather to revel in a particular world. I’ll say it’s fair to argue that a lot of action games now have all the fun and thrills that a typical Hollywood movie has (think COD4, MGS, or Halo). Even the movie Inception has the structure of a standard action game: learn the rules of the game, go through a series of incrementally difficult challenges that span various environments (translate: levels) until you reach the final challenge that culminates in every test that has been experienced along the way. The key difference between video games and other art forms is that no other medium is as interactive and free. That should not be looked at as a handicap, but rather an advantage. There is plenty of room to grow here.

So video games, I guess all I’m trying to say is that…I like you. I like you a lot.

Links related to this debate:

Roger Ebert's initial blog posting: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

His second posting where he basically gives up on arguing with the nerds: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html

TED talk defending video games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww&feature=player_embedded